MONTREAL, Jan. 19, 2015 /CNW Telbec/ - CQDM is very pleased to announce that Janssen Inc. (Janssen) is joining its public-private consortium to support highly innovative, collaborative research in Canada to accelerate drug discovery and development, in order to bring better treatments to patients.
The new partnership with Janssen brings to nine (9) the number of pharmaceutical companies around CQDM's table, increasing the financial leverage that partners generate together. Thanks to CQDM's unique business model, this leverage can go up to 25 times, depending on the funding program and co-funding partners, allowing the development of breakthrough tools, technologies and platforms which can help to bring faster health solutions from bench to bedside, at a much lower cost.
Janssen is joining CQDM's precompetitive research consortium as a program specific member and will be associated with the Explore Program. This program funds highly innovative, unconventional, high-risk and high-reward research from Quebec and Ontario that may significantly accelerate drug discovery across the industry by increasing R&D productivity and developing new research avenues. It also supports early concept validation of disruptive technologies to enhance drug discovery.
"We are very happy to welcome to CQDM such an innovative partner as Janssen. Janssen has been very creative in establishing strategic collaborations with academia, biotech and other pharmaceutical companies to tap into the best science to leverage expertise. We will certainly benefit from their experience," said Diane Gosselin, President and CEO of CQDM. "The addition of Janssen to the consortium also demonstrates the quality and uniqueness of the collaborative environment we offer to our stakeholders to address the most important unmet medical needs."
In addition to its financial contribution, Janssen will also contribute in-kind to the consortium, namely by having a representative on CQDM's Explore Advisory Committee, as well as key scientists involved in CQDM's unique mentorship program. Mentors are the ultimate users of the technologies that are being developed under CQDM's funding and are well positioned to help the funded researchers better align the technologies with industry needs. As of today, about 100 mentors from CQDM's pharmaceutical company members have been involved in 35 projects conducted by a network of 460 researchers throughout Canada.
About CQDM
CQDM is a pharma-based consortium active in pre-competitive research whose mission is to fund the development of innovative tools and technologies to accelerate drug discovery. Unique in the world, CQDM's business model is based on a collaborative approach where all stakeholders share the costs of biopharmaceutical research and benefit from its results. CQDM also provides a common meeting ground where academia, governments, and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries converge to address numerous complex medical challenges. CQDM receives financial support from Merck, Pfizer Canada, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly Canada, Janssen, Novartis Pharma Canada, Sanofi Canada, as well as from Quebec's Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Exports (MEIE) and from the Government of Canada under the Business-Led Networks of Centres of Excellence Program (BL-NCE). For more information, visit us at www.cqdm.org.
SOURCE CQDM
Julie Martineau, Senior Director, Communications and Corporate Development, CQDM, Tel.: +1 (514) 766-6661, ext. 2198, [email protected], www.cqdm.org
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